The First Joke Book

At the time when Pope Eugenius was in Florence, a very clever ten-year-old boy came to visit Cardinal Angelotto and in a few words made him a brilliant speech. Angelotto wondered at the maturity and polish of the boy's diction and asked him some questions, which he answered cleverly. Turning to the bystanders Angelotto said: "Those who display such intelligence and learning in their childhood decrease in wit as they increase in age, and finally turn out to be stupid." Then the boy retorted: "Then you must indeed have been extraordinarily learned and wise when you were young." The Cardinal was staggered at this impromptu witty reply, for he had been rebuked for his foolishness by what he thought was a mere child.

This is from a popular book from the late Middle Ages, Liber Facetiarum or Facetiae, "Book of Jokes." The first of its kind, it stayed popular and in print for centuries in Europe. One might think the creator of the book was an irreverent man, but he was an important secretary to several popes.

Poggio Bracciolini (1380 - 1459) was born in Tuscany and sent to Florence by his father to study, where he distinguished himself as an excellent copyist of manuscripts. His skill brought him attention from some of the chief scholars of the time, whose endorsements helped place him as secretary to the bishop of Bari. That position brought him advancement to the Chancery of Apostolic Briefs (the office that performs all the Vatican diplomatic functions) as a writer of official documents. His excellent Latin and penmanship kept him in the employ of seven popes over 50 years.

He used his pure and scholarly Latin to compose/gather a collection of humorous anecdotes that did not receive a formal printing until 1470, but then was re-printed and translated all over Europe. These often portray the friction between husbands and wives:

Another man, looking for his wife who had drowned in the river, was walking upstream. A bystander, wondering at this, advised him to look for her in the other direction. "I'll never find her that way," replied the husband, "for while she lived she was excessively difficult and bad-tempered and always did the opposite of everyone else, so that even after her death she could only go against the current."

He was also fond of jokes regarding flatulence, of which I will share one:

A young woman, while visiting her parents in the country with her husband, went walking with him through the woods, and saw how certain sheep in a flock were exceptionally courted by the rams. “Why are these preferred above the rest?” she asked. To which her husband replied that nature had so fashioned these matters that the rams hastened first to those sheep which let out a strong odor from the rear. And this is also true of humans, he added. 

The woman was silent. But on the following day, as they walked through the woods again, she became desirous of her husband’s embraces and, recalling his words, permitted herself to break wind. 

Whereat the young man, recognizing the sign, did not fail to satisfy her desires.

Bracciolini also included several defecation jokes, but that is where I draw the line.

He gave arguably a greater gift to the modern world in his discovery of several older manuscripts otherwise lost to antiquity, and I'll delve into that next time.